Lisabeth Mackall stood barefoot in her hectic kitchen, eating macaroni and cheese on a countertop, too busy to sit for dinner.

“Tommy, can you please use some manners?” she snapped, as her son wolfed down his food.

Watching it all was Frank Mackall.

“I talk a little slower,” he said. “The hardest part is that it is self …”

He paused.

“Limiting?” suggested Lisabeth.

“Conscious,” said Frank. “I am self-conscious. The thoughts are there, but they can’t come out in words.”

“Well, your wife chats a lot,” joked Lisabeth, as she plucked a bug from his face.

Police officer Frank “The Tank” Mackall was injured in January 2012 — suffering brain damage that has changed his life and the lives of almost everyone who knows him.

“Frank was essentially killed — the husband and the father and the person we all knew,” said Lisabeth. “He is gone.”

In his place, a new Frank Mackall is emerging. Day by day, he is clawing his way back, struggling to learn to talk, rebuilding broken family bonds.

A new Lisabeth Mackall is emerging, too.

She has discovered a latent talent as a journalist. She has written a new book, and her blog has attracted more than 200,000 visitors.

She has become a sought-after advocate for brain-injured patients, with 16 speaking engagements in May. She quit her job.

And a new family is emerging, with new rules, new relationships and new appreciation for each other.

“You know, it would have been easier if you had been killed,” Lisabeth said to Frank recently in their Cottage Grove home.

But she’s grateful that he wasn’t. “Not many people get a second chance like this,” she said. “Living is a gift. Frank being here is a gift.”

‘HE IS NOT JUST MY FRANK’

On Jan. 2, 2012, a woman in Savage called police. She had seen a prowler by her daughter’s bedroom window.

Officer Mackall was on duty. As he drove to the house, he slid on an icy road and hit a tree.

When his wife got the call, she rushed to North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale. She found her husband looking like a corpse — in a coma, breathing only through a tube in his throat.

She wouldn’t let their children see him. “They would never get over that,” she said.

Immediately, instinctively, she started a blog on the CaringBridge website.

It freed her from the onslaught of calls from well-wishers — and released a flood of feelings as her husband teetered on the brink of death.

On CaringBridge, Lisabeth laid bare her anxieties, the daily hassles, the dashed hopes and the exhilarating progress.

“I never really could write before,” she said. “Now I just sit down and write, go over it for mistakes, and I print it. I do not filter anything.”

She soon realized that her audience went beyond family and friends. She began to feel like the caretaker of a beloved public asset.

“He is not just my Frank,” she said. “He is the community’s Frank.”

Frank’s brain damage was severe. Rounds of therapy began, including hours a day to learn again how to walk and talk.

But he had one advantage. Lisabeth’s job happened to be — out of all possible careers — a brain-injury therapist. She had 17 years of experience, most recently an eight-year stint with ProStep Rehab.

“All the stuff, the ventilator and the vomiting blood, is not so scary to me,” she said.

But it made their lives awkward.

When Frank was released after almost three months, Lisabeth became the primary caretaker. She would return from an exhausting day working with brain-injured patients to find another brain-injured patient waiting for her.

She lurched from role to role — wife, mother, therapist.

“It is a little yucky when your work universe lands in your home universe,” she said.

Frank felt conflicted, too. After several months at home, he made a request: More wife, less therapist.

Lisabeth felt like she was being pulled apart.

“I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line of my career, my family took a back seat,” she wrote in her blog on April 25, 2012.

“They were second, or maybe even third. I loved my job — it was who I was — but didn’t I love my family more?”

‘I HATE DADDY’

“I hate Daddy.”

The words hung in the air. In the silence, Lisabeth looked sadly at her 7-year-old son, Tommy.

She knew what he meant. The boy missed his old daddy. His old daddy was funny, outgoing, brave. His old daddy was a policeman, tougher than any bad guy.

But his new daddy moved slowly, hardly spoke at all, and couldn’t play or read to him.

“That is one of the real feelings children have,” said Lisabeth, recalling the comment she posted on her blog last winter.

Their kids — Mariah, 16; A.J., 11; and Tommy, now 8 — had seen Frank as invincible. The new Frank, as Lisabeth called him, seemed weird, distant and alien.

Bob is a 40-year veteran (yes, he is grizzled) who edited one Pulitzer Prize winner and wrote two that were nominated. He has also worked in Des Moines, Colorado Springs and Palo Alto. He writes about the suburbs, the environment, housing, religion -- anything but politics. Secret pleasures: Kayaking on the Mississippi on the way to work, doughnuts brought in by someone else. Best office prank: Piling more papers onto Fred Melo’s already trash-covered desk.

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